For it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.

Saturday, 9 November 2013

Full Spectrum Offence: Savoy's Neo-Weird

‘The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres’,

Institute of English Studies,
Senate House, University of London (8 November 2013)

The ‘Old Weird’ could be seen to be
characterized by a notably dubious, not to say toxic, politics. H.P. Lovecraft’s
racism is an obvious case – ‘the polyglot abyss’ of The Horror at Red Hook (1925) demonstrating the synthesis of racial
panic and cosmic horror. We could also mention that Arthur Machen, when asked
by the editors of Authors Take Sides
for his views on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, was one of five authors who
supported Franco, writing: ‘Arthur Machen begs to inform you that he is, and
always has been, entirely for Franco.’ Algernon Blackwood, in his short story
‘Adventures of a Private Secretary’ (1906), has the character of an ‘old Jew’
with ‘an air of obsequious insolence’ (this is one of the milder slurs), called
Marx (!).[1]
Penguin’s decision to reprint the story in a volume of Blackwood’s Selected Tales in 1943 defies reasoned
comment. Beyond personal politics I think we can also hazard a literary
politics of the Old Weird that often rests on a sense of racial or political
anxiety or threat.

The
‘New Weird’, in obvious contrast, has a politics that is often much more to the
Left. Beyond the obvious example of China Miéville, I would like to note a more
general tendency to a cultural politics of loving the alien. The Weird is not
seen as simply some terrible threat, but only a threat when perceived as such
from within social constraints. The monstrous or Weird is to be celebrated for
its expansion of consciousness and erosion of the bourgeois ego – the latter exemplified,
often, by Lovecraft’s uptight ‘heroes’.[2]

Grant
Morrison’s short story ‘Lovecraft in Heaven’ exemplifies this turn by rewriting
the ‘Old Weird’ into the ‘New Weird’.[3]
Lovecraft is dying of cancer and Morrison considers the self-replicating
monstrosity of cancer as the physical embodiment of both Lovecraft’s creatures
and his fear of the feminine (the ‘cuntworld’ as Morrison puts it[4]).
Lovecraft’s positivist rationalism makes him unable to embrace the chaotic and
fractal. In conversation with his fictional creation Professor George Angell
Lovecraft states: ‘I have come here to confirm my belief that the World of
Reason still holds dominion over the primeval depths of the human imagination.’
Angell replies that Lovecraft is ‘quite naïve’ and that, in fact, ‘Reason is
the flimsy mask on the face of Chaos’. Lovecraft’s rejoinder is ‘Then our whole
world is a nightmare.’ ‘Only if you fear it’, is Angell’s reply. Angell starts
to breakdown verbally and physically, saying ‘we must embrace them … integrate
them’.[5]
The story ends with Lovecraft being opened like a door, not into Hell, as Lovecraft
supposes, but into Heaven.[6]
This is the DeleuzoGuattarian Weird – in their preference for Lovecraft’s Dunsanian
trips to his cosmic horror,[7]
or the Levinasian weird of alterity and its integration.

World
of Horror

What I want to consider here is a form
of the ‘New Weird’ that embraces or integrates the toxic politics of certain
strains of the Old Weird; this is the work of Manchester-based publishers Savoy
and, most notably, their creation Lord Horror. Horror is a fictionalised
reworking of wartime broadcaster for the Nazi’s William Joyce, nicknamed Lord
Haw-Haw and executed for treason in 1946. The works deliberately, rather than
unconsciously, toy with anti-Semitism, racism, and, in the figure of La Squab,
paedophilic desire for the ‘fille fatale’. To be clear from the start I am not
celebrating or endorsing this turn or self-conscious return to the politically
toxic. These works disturb me profoundly, which is why I want to consider them
as an outlier of contemporary Weird fiction.

The
world of Savoy and the world of Lord Horror is a multi-media platform. Lord
Horror has appeared in novels (Lord
Horror (1989), Motherfuckers: The
Auschwitz of Oz (1996), Baptised in
the Blood of Millions (2001), Invictus
Horror (2013)), graphic novels or comics (Lord Horror series (1-7) (1989-1990) Reverbstorm 8-14 (1994-2000) (2012)), music, film, and criticism (Horror Panegyric (2008)). He also has
sidekicks, in the form of Meng & Ecker (The
Adventures of Meng & Ecker (1997)), and spin-off characters, such as La
Squab (daughter of Meng) (La Squab
(2012)).[8]
The result is a ‘universe’ or mythos, somewhere between Lovecraft and the
comic-book worlds of publishers like DC or Marvel. This dispersion gives a
paradoxical consistency to Lord Horror as – like one of his models, Michael Moorcock’s
Jerry Cornelius – he moves between times and formats. For reasons of brevity
and economy today I want to focus on his appearance within the graphic novel Reverbstorm.

Reverbstorm was a continuation of the
first 7 Lord Horror comics and it
appeared in 8 issues from 1994-2000. In 2012 these issues were collected
together in one graphic novel, with an added final issue. David Britton is the
writer, with the main artist being John Coulthart and additional art provided
by Kris Guidio, while Michael Butterworth is the editor. The earlier Lord Horror comics, written by Michael
Butterworth and drawn by Kris Guidio had initially been more ‘postmodern’ in
their playing with comic conventions and comic characters the tone shifts
dramatically in Reverbstorm. Now
drawn primarily by John Coulthart the density of the art, the decline in the
words, and the movement to a thoroughgoing engagement with modernist
aesthetics, produces something slightly less immediately confrontational but
certainly more strange.

The
shift began with John Coulthart’s work for Lord
Horror 5 – a series of full page images of an imaginary Auschwitz with
empty white text squares. Coulthart describes this as a ‘unique conjunction of
Holocaust architecture and Weird Fiction.’[9]
In fact Coulthart drew on and reworked an earlier image from his The Call of Cthulhu adaptation of R’lyeh
to figure this imaginary camp. Obviously this is a shocking violation of the
refusal of representation of the Holocaust and, even more provocatively, this
violation melds the camps with the pulp world of Weird Fiction. It also opens
to an architectural or spatial vision of the weird, which I now want to
explore.

Spatial
Dialectics

Just as the distinction between the
latent and manifest contents of the dream had ceased to be valid, so had any
division between the real and the super-real in the external world. Phantoms
slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial
and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at
Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah.

The world of horror is now disconnected
directly from the world of William Joyce – that of the 1920s, 30s and the war –
displaced into a ‘future’ setting of Torenbürgen (the ‘unreal city’), or what
Coulthart calls ‘Lord Horror’s vicious dreamscape of fascist atrocity’.[11]
Lord Horror is living with Jessie Matthews (modelled on the English dancer,
singer and actress of the 1920s and 30s). Matthews is a rock star, credited
with reintroducing reverb into popular music, while Lord Horror defends her
against anti-Semitic slurs and joins her on stage to sing. Horror is joined by
his ‘brother’ James Joyce.

Horror
still broadcasts a mixture of rock and roll with cut-ups of William Joyce on
his radio show ‘Amerikkka’s war in the ether’ on Radio Reich Rund Funk. As
Michael Paraskos notes in his review for The
Spectator (!), ‘it is difficult to outline a clear narrative thread’.[12]
His suggestion that the images represent Benjamin’s wreckage of history, quoted
at the beginning of Reverbstorm, is
astute. For Coulthart ‘Reverbstorm throws these numerous influences out like a
dark prism, flashing broken images of refracted black light’.[13]
I want to suggest this image practice inhabits something like what Fredric
Jameson calls a ‘spatial dialectics’.[14]
In Reverbstorm temporality has
collapsed, or been collapsed, and instead we have the spatial play of fragments
which are, pace Eliot, not ‘shored against my ruins’.[15]

These
fragments are the ruin; organised within the frame they are brought into
contact to generate the weird effect. For Lovecraft modernism was conceived of
under the sign of horror. When we encounter R’lyeh, in The Call of Cthulhu:

Without knowing what
futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of
the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he
dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces – surfaces
too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious
with horrible images and hieroglyphs.[16]

Torenbürgen is horrific, but also a
space of modernism – a butchered modernism. This is Eliotic modernism with the
anti-Semitism amplified and embodied. To ‘read’ or ‘view’ this non-narrative
space is to engage with a difficult act of extracting meaning and reference
while also attending to the clash and emptying of meaning.

Integrate
That

I have drawn a contrast between the
dubious politics of the old weird and the politics of acceptance and
integration of the monstrous of the new weird. While I have suggested Savoy’s Lord Horror is an outlier to the new
weird paradigm I’d also like to end by noting that it does produce a work of
integration. In this case, as I’ve previously argued, what we are called to
integrate is ‘fascinating (British) fascism’: the politics of William Joyce,
the pre- and post-war politics of Oswald Mosley, and the anti-Semitism and
racism that runs through certain strands of modernism.[17]
This is integration in the mode of disintegration, in which fascism, Nazism and
racism are coded through and as the Weird – also activating the dubious
politics of the Weird as well.

Obviously
we can note at least two problems with this strategy. The first is the problem
Perry Anderson identified with post-structuralism: the randomization of
history. Rather than generating the tension or contradiction of a dialectic
this spatial arrangement of images and signifiers merely serves to mix-up and
even neutralise the ‘charge’ of the toxic materials it plays with. The result
is not so much a force-field, but rather a slackening of tension. The second,
inverse, problem is that this integration and neutralization servers a jouissance – a pained ‘enjoyment’ – that
reactivates the toxic core as aesthetic option. Far from challenging the
fascination of fascism this ‘weird fascism’ integrates the toxic core as
‘attractive’ possibility.

In
some ways the point is that we can’t simply immunise ourselves against these
problems or possibilities. The final issue of the graphic novel concerns, in
its text, the disintegration of Lord Horror as his insides push out through his
skin. This terminal collapse involves reprising the key image elements, under
the pressure that refuses to integrate. The tension of this (dis)integrative
moment remains and, I should say, never fails to disturb me. So, I’m not simply
recommending a return to the malignant politics of some of the Old Weird
writers. Instead, I’m interested in how this malignant politics feeds the
horror element of the Weird and how Savoy’s return to this malignant politics
puts the contemporary Weird under pressure. This, I think, is the tension of
our moment.

[2] This model is, in
fact, figured in Lovecraft’s own fiction. In his story ‘The Whisperer in
Darkness’ (1931) one character, who has had his brain transferred into a metal
cylinder by the Fungi from Yuggoth (!), claims ‘‘What I had thought morbid and shameful
and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious – my previous estimate being
merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.’ (193)